Mercy Health Center was recently named the “Best of the Environmental Best” by Keep Oklahoma Beautiful for “an exhaustive program of green initiatives,” the hospital said Nov. 24.
“We are honored to receive the top award for our environmental efforts,” Jim Gebhart, president of Mercy Health Center, said. “The Sisters of Mercy have long been good stewards of the planet and we will continue to find ways to conserve energy and reduce waste.”
Mercy’s green efforts have inlcuded:
- Mercy has gone green with cleaning chemicals.
- Mercy has eliminated 99.9 percent of plastic water bottle usage.
- Mercy has switched from Styrofoam containers to a 100-percent biodegradable product.
- More than 20,000 pounds of cardboard is recycled every month.
- Mercy’s hospital-wide recycling program is underway with 350 blue bins located throughout the main hospital.
While Mercy has a history steeped in caring not only for people but communities, John Harkess, M.D., medical director of Mercy’s infection prevention program, was the impetus for establishing an environmental stewardship committee at Mercy.
“With some 3,000 Mercy coworkers, there’s a great deal of opportunity to do the right thing for our community,” Harkess said, who personally composts, line dries his clothes and sometimes commutes from Edmond to work on his bicycle. “We’ve been tracking our waste and in a 12-month period, we diverted more than 700 cubic yards of waste from our Oklahoma landfills. That works out to something like 200 pickup loads of trash, and we’re just getting started. We will continue to find ways to recycle and reduce.”